Various components of gas turbine engines, such as those engines used to power modern aircraft, often require in-situ wear and status monitoring for maintenance and performance purposes. Some gas turbine engine components implement embedded sensors for such monitoring. Typically, these embedded sensors include radio frequency identification (RFID) capabilities that operate at frequencies of tens or hundreds of MHz. The RFID allows the embedded sensor to communicate wirelessly with an external reader system through the surface of the gas turbine engine component.
While generally effective, such RFID embedded sensors are less efficient when used with metallic or highly conductive gas turbine engine components such as, for example, aircraft skins or turbine blades. Directly embedding such RFID sensors underneath the metallic surface of these components make the wireless reading of the sensors difficult. In particular, the operating frequency of tens or hundreds of MHz interacts with the conductive surfaces to create eddy currents that prevent significant magnetic field penetration through the conductive surface so that the ability of the external reader system to read the embedded RFID sensor is reduced and, in some instances, nearly impossible. As an example in some arrangements, the eddy currents not only exist on the surface of the conductive component, but may also be created on the vertical and horizontal surfaces of the housing which contains the sensor as well.